March 29, 2004
Volume 4, Issue 2
DCIA at Digital Hollywood and GEMS
"Transforming the Entertainment Industry" is the theme for this year's Digital Hollywood Spring Conference taking place March 29-31 in Los Angeles, CA. This three-day event features more than 280 industry-leading speakers and for the first time includes multiple sessions focusing on peer-to-peer (P2P) distribution and digital rights management (DRM) solutions for music, video, games, and software.
The DCIA will actively be participating on Wednesday 3/31 with a Session from 12:50 PM to 2:00 PM entitled: NEXT GENERATION P2P MUSIC AND FILM - DRM, PAID FOR PASS-ALONG AND OTHER LEGAL DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING MODELS AND THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRIES. Featured speakers include Christian von Burkleo, SVP of Altnet; Chip Venters, CEO of Digital Containers; Les Ottolenghi, Founding Partner of INTENT MediaWorks; Luke Rippy, CEO of Seamless P2P; and Gabe Zichermann, VP of Trymedia Systems. DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty will moderate.
The distributed computing industry is taking its technologies into the mainstream, from paid-for-pass-along to DRM solutions, and now has an active trade association advancing its interests. This session goes into the practical applications of P2P in the marketplace.
Later in the week, the Global Entertainment and Media Summit (GEMS) takes place April 3-4 in New York, NY. This year's event features more than 40 seminars, workshops, clinics, and keynotes presented by industry leaders, including sessions focused on helping content providers harness the power of P2P for secure and profitable distribution of their copyrighted works.
The DCIA will host an exhibit booth throughout GEMS for Members and prospective Members including BlueMaze Entertainment, Clickshare, Cornerband, Digital Containers, and INTENT MediaWorks, and present a keynote presentation on Sunday 4/4 from 4:15 PM to 5:30 PM focusing on rights holder compensation and offering tangible examples of artists currently benefiting from P2P distribution. We will also demonstrate the progress and the benefits to all sectors from working together on solutions that advance art, technology, and connectivity.
GEMS' conference audience is approximately 1,000 creators, marketers, and business leaders from the film, television, and music communities.
Welcome to Relatable
Please warmly welcome Relatable to the Platform Group. We look forward to providing valuable services to this newest DCIA Member and supporting its contributions to commercial development of the distributed computing industry.
Relatable, LLC is a privately held software company founded in November 1999 and located in Alexandria, VA. Its software is based on a series of advanced pattern recognition, content identification, indexing, and search technologies. According to Founder and CEO, Pat Breslin, "Relatable has developed advanced acoustic fingerprinting software for digital music using proprietary technology to perform complex pattern analysis and identification of audio media."
"Relatable's TRM functions as a 'digital barcode' for music and media content. It creates a universal identifier that is based purely on the audio content itself and facilitates copyright compensation and personalized music delivery on the Internet. TRM can identify each music file a user generates or encounters without requiring cumbersome restrictions on user behavior common among most digital rights management (DRM) solutions. Its track-level understanding of digital music enthusiasts' existing music collections is essential to effectively compensate for copyrights in a P2P environment.
The Relatable Engine is an advanced media recommendation application that introduces a new approach to personalization: feature-guided collaborative filtering. The Engine conducts an analysis of the properties of music (information such as the genre, tempo and tone of a song), and combines it with an analysis of an individual's music preferences, to deliver accurate music recommendations and expand the pool of musical content that can be recommended. The Engine can integrate with and learn from any Internet-enabled device that can deliver digital music such as jukebox software applications, MP3 players, Internet appliances, PDAs and mobile phones.
Relatable is now developing additional applications for the P2P marketplace that take advantage of the exceptional performance, scalability and cost-effectiveness that is unique to its technology. Relatable is interested in working with content and distribution companies that are trying to identify and organize delivery of digital media content and personalize the consumer's entertainment and commercial experience.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 There has recently been considerable controversy over a draft letter attributed to collaboration between California 's Attorney General and a major entertainment industry trade association.
While the question of the propriety of this collaboration has been publicly questioned by other parties, the substance of the letter was also troubling because it perpetuated negative incorrect and outdated information about our forming industry.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications are essentially search engines that access content from published file directories. As a recent General Accounting Office (GAO) report confirmed, the risks posed by P2P software are no greater than those posed by the use of browsers, e-mail applications, instant messaging, or commercial search engines on the Internet.
Leading P2P software companies, including DCIA Members Sharman Networks, Grokster, and RazorPop have voluntarily taken steps such as integrating world-class virus protection software, implementing default settings with conspicuous warnings to prevent inadvertent sharing of personal information, and providing family filters enabling parents to protect their children from exposure to undesirable content.
Anti-virus programs have been integrated with P2P software preconfigured to automatically be operational from installation, protecting not only immediate users, but also subsequent file sharers. These can be updated for new virus definitions at user-determined intervals. In addition, responsible P2P software companies promptly warn consumers of known virus attacks. Because of the enormous distribution of P2P software, with the market-leading application, Kazaa Media Desktop (KMD), now downloaded more than 320 million times worldwide, file-sharing software along with MS Outlook presents a high-yield target for attempted malware dissemination, but such attacks have been and can continue to be defeated by combining vigilance with use of the provided tools.
Leading P2P software such as KMD also installs with default settings to prevent unintentional redistribution of personal information and other private data files not placed into a shared folder by the end user. To change this setting, a consumer must commit to move these files by making several affirmative choices that are clearly and timely explained throughout the process. In addition to well-documented actions taken individually by P2P companies to continually introduce upgrades and new versions of their software, consumer communications and education programs have been undertaken under the auspices of the DCIA working with other organizations and are ongoing.
Child pornography attributed to P2P is down from 2% in 2002 to 1.4% in 2003, with the vast majority of the remaining 98%+ coming from websites and chat-rooms. There is no commercial child pornography on P2P, unlike other areas of the Internet, and deterrence and education programs developed by the DCIA and our Members are well into their development process.
P2P software suppliers like Sharman Networks lead Internet-based companies in providing tools enabling parents to protect their children from exposure to undesirable content. Users can employ integrated family filters choosing from options to block adult content, which is the default setting, add more keywords to be blocked, prevent all video and images from being downloaded, and password-protect their filter settings.
DCIA Members alone represent, with an average of 50 million licensed files now distributed monthly, the largest form of distribution of legally traded copyrighted music, movies, software, and video games on the Internet. This is accomplished primarily through licensing agreements with small independent content suppliers, while the large movie studios and major labels still collectively boycott P2P. Despite that, licensed content distribution continues steadily to increase on P2P.
Leading P2P software suppliers notify consumers with clarity and frequency about copyright infringement pre-installation and during the operation of their applications. End-user license agreements (EULAs) carry additional warnings.
The failure of major entertainment companies to license their content for P2P distribution remains the key problem - and this is primarily a business rather than a legal issue. The only documented unusual costs to P2P users are from settling lawsuits brought by the recording industry for uploading music that major labels have refused to license, and the only unique dangers to P2P users are from such threats.
The solution is for these media conglomerates to end their group boycott and license their content for P2P distribution.
The DCIA is proud of the responsiveness and track record of steady improvements already made by leading P2P software suppliers and our other Members. But more than that, we are pleased that they remain committed to further enhance both the safety and value of the user experience on behalf of their consumers and the public at large.
The DCIA and all of our Members respect and support the attorneys general in the performance of their roles as chief legal officers for their states. The source and motives of the document that was circulated certainly bear scrutiny, as do the relevant facts related to its content, before any conclusions are drawn. We believe this draft letter was primarily driven by a business issue that will resolve itself as major entertainment companies license their content for P2P distribution. We are actively seeking to make that happen as expeditiously as possible, and also welcome the opportunity to work cooperatively and proactively with the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG).
New DCI Patent for Tracking Content
Digital Containers Receives Notice of Allowance
DCIA Member Digital Containers Inc. (DCI) last week received a Notice of Allowance from the US Patent and Trademark Office for its "Tracking Electronic Content" technology. With this allowance, DCI has been provided protection for a system in which its Digital Containers persistently report the identification of, and provide information about, any new user that opens a Digital Container and accesses its protected content. With the company's previously awarded patent, "Regulating Access to Digital Content," US Patent No. 6,389,541, DCI can provide an architecture that is lightweight and supports its super-distribution system (called SuperDRM) for various types of content.
According to DCI CEO Chip Venters, "We're very excited about this new patent that now gives DCI strong intellectual property protection for our SuperDRM system. SuperDRM combines the benefits of super-distribution with e-commerce-enabled digital rights management. It allows digital information to be freely distributed via peer-to-peer (P2P) or in other ways over the Internet (via e-mail or instant messaging) while simultaneously protecting the information, tracking the usage and collecting payment, when appropriate."
The central concept of "Tracking Electronic Content" is that access to electronic content can be tracked as it passes from user to user, whether P2P file-sharing software, e-mail, instant-messaging, or physical media are being used. The tracking function is accomplished by sending and receiving notification information as each successive user accesses or attempts to access the electronic content.
Once the notification information has been successfully sent to an address that is determined by the original sender, access to the content is then selectively granted based on previously defined criteria. This access granting mechanism also ties into the token authorization / payment processing concept patented by DCI in "Regulating Access to Digital Content" to create a complete SuperDRM system that is suitable for use in the music, film, e-book, and enterprise markets.
"DCI's SuperDRM is critical to the success of new distribution channels like P2P," said Les Ottolenghi, founding partner of DCIA Member INTENT MediaWorks. "The only way to reach a global market is through super-distribution, which of course requires one user passing along media efficiently and securely. SuperDRM enables super-distribution and makes P2P a legitimate commercial effort."
Ottolenghi added, "By serving a large and global market through decentralized P2P distribution and operations, companies like ours who distribute media over the Internet and via P2P can realize significant cost advantages compared to the old methods of centralized distribution which incur too many costs and are typically unfair to media creators."
|
